The Crooked House (28 page)

‘You were one of the first at the scene?’

She only nodded, focusing on the line of the horizon, her voice, when it came, sounded distant. ‘Kids do go on killing sprees,’ she said. ‘We all know that. Kids kill their parents – rarely but they do. Mostly male children, but not exclusively, so we had to look at her. We had to ask her questions.’

‘That’s America, right?’ said Jennings, uneasy. ‘When Dad takes away the computer game?’

She looked at him flatly, and shrugged. ‘Not always,’ she said. She turned back and began to walk briskly to the car. ‘Sometimes it’s learned, it’s abuse, it’s deprivation.’ She felt his dull regard. ‘Sometimes there’s not an explanation. Some kids just have poison in their systems, from birth. Some adults too.’ She climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine.

They turned down the high street, heading for the water: the village was silent under the grey sky. They passed an ambulance outside a house in a row of net-curtained cottages as the front door opened and a stretcher edged out. A woman lay prone on it, an oxygen mask obscuring her face.

‘Everything said it was the father,’ said Sarah Rutherford, staring ahead, talking to herself. ‘All the evidence. Statistically it’s overwhelmingly probable. He had the gun in his hand, he’d just found out about the kids, his wife … his wife …’

It wouldn’t do.

Jennings was quiet but she kept talking. ‘The only contradictory evidence was the old guy but he changed his story every five minutes: he saw John Grace getting into a car with a man, then it was a woman, then he didn’t see it at all. You’d have never got him into a witness box and if you had no one would have believed a word of it.’ Still talking to herself. ‘How
could I say it to her? To Esme? Alison. Give her hope? Hope of nothing. Hope a killer’s still out there.’

From the driver’s seat she shot him a glance, then looked back at the road. ‘She didn’t do it,’ she said quietly. ‘Unless I’ve never had a good instinct in my life, that night when someone killed her mother, her brother, her sisters, Esme Grace was hiding upstairs. She’d have been a victim too if the murderer had known she was there. So she didn’t have anything to do with Bray’s death either, and I don’t care what the Watts boy thinks he saw.’

But Jennings’s head was turning away, looking. ‘The kid,’ he said, subdued, and Sarah looked too, and as they drew level with the pub there she was.

‘Nightmare,’ she said. Gina Harling’s kid. May. Chatwin’s kid, too. Sitting in the wind at a pub bench, her sharp red nose in a bag of crisps, May looked up to watch the police car. She stood. Those skinny legs they have, thought Rutherford. Her own daughter was with her dad, Saturday morning at the shops.
I can’t talk about bad mothers.

They pulled up on the muddy gravel outside the boatyard, and climbed out.

‘But if it wasn’t him and it wasn’t her,’ said Jennings, but when she turned on him he faltered. The boatyard’s big doors were locked, you could see a flash of green, bright in the flat light, to one side. ‘What kind … what kind of person does that?’

‘What I said about poison?’ Sarah Rutherford examined her subordinate’s face for a sign he understood, and saw nothing. ‘Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with this place, something in the soil, salt or something that stops things growing straight, it’s land where it should be all sea, I don’t know …’ She broke off, feeling his eyes on her, his alarm. She took a breath. ‘You saw those kids we brought in, they’d been chucking breeze blocks off the bridge, just for the hell of it. You might
see them running about on a football field, or ten years on chatting some girl up in a bar – they’d give you a cheeky smile, charm you. You can’t see it from the outside but they’re poisoned.’

There was movement: someone came around the side of the boatyard and stood, but neither of them turned. Jennings was watching her like a dog waiting for the ball to be thrown.

‘Sometimes they’re born into it,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it comes down from a single incident, sometimes it grows, over years. Battered wives, jealous sons.’ Accidents, she thought, remembering the Marshall’s baby dead in its cot of smoke inhalation. ‘Love can do it. Hate can do it. Not giving a shit can do it, too.’

Then she turned, and Jennings with her. Cathy Watts stood behind them on her patch of grass with her arms folded.

‘Can I have a word?’ said Sarah Rutherford.

She
was out, she was gone, she was running.

Bare feet, and the blue dress had gone under the arms. As she clambered through the wire towards him Alison had felt the old cloth pull, the ancient seams giving way. Now as she ran it loosened, opened and the cold wind crept inside. She was a bird, it beat her, it lifted and flung her, out to sea.

She counted her breaths, eight-beat, her feet slapping sore on the road.
One
two three four.
Five
six seven eight. A snicket between cottages presented itself, she took it and she was on a long, dead straight concrete path between high hedges. She could smell the water treatment plant on the edge of the marsh, its gate stood far ahead at the end of the weed-sprouting concrete. The hedges blocked her view, it was a route she had retraced in dreams for half her life and she found it again blindly, by touch, by smell, cow parsley, cut grass, mud and shit. Here. Now here. She reached the peeling gate to the sewage works and sidestepped: a fence. A stile. On the other side a great shaggy horse shied and lumbered away on tufted hooves and she kept going.

Her
glasses jiggled and slid on her nose but stayed on. Underfoot the grass and mud were soft after the tarmac but every graze, every scrape and bruise the road had left felt sound and healthy to her. She found her path in a dream but her body was awake, it reminded her: she was alive. Esme lived.

Danny had held on to her as she climbed through the wire fence, his hands on her arms. He didn’t let her go even when she was on the other side, only stared, his tanned face inches away.

Why had she fixed on Martin Watts? Danny could have done it. Danny could have come to her house that night. His hand was hard and tight on her arm: Alison looked down at it.

‘I came to get you,’ Danny had said as he pulled her closer. She resisted, but didn’t break loose.

‘It wasn’t you,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t you I saw out there, waiting for Bray.’

Gina had been behind her under the trees, watching. She hadn’t responded when Alison had said to her,
Hold on
. Her mouth hard. Alison had gone to him anyway.

‘Where’s your brother?’ she said, now close up against him, her wrists in his hands. ‘Is he all right? I thought it might have been him at the church.’

‘With Mum,’ said Danny, and then he relaxed his grip but still she didn’t pull away. ‘He’s all right when he’s with Mum.’

She held his gaze. ‘The night my family was killed,’ she said, no longer surprised by how level she could keep her voice. ‘Where was your brother that night?’

‘We saw you riding up the high street on your bike,’ said Danny. ‘You saw us.’

‘Later,’ she said. ‘Where was he later?’ The heads turning in the market square. Danny and Martin. Which one? ‘Someone brought Dad back to the house in a car.’ Not Martin. Not a man. Her head ached: the night was full of blanks. The car.
Something jumped in her mind, something that had been compressed so small she could hardly see it as it sprang open, jack in a box. A woman.

Screaming. A woman screaming insults. The information was unstable, it danced and dodged in her head like dust in sunlight. A car. A woman. How long after that had the noises begun? She grasped for certainties. ‘Someone broke his glasses,’ she said. ‘Where was Martin?’

‘He was with me,’ said Danny, and his eyes narrowed like his mother’s, gleaming like metal reflecting the slaty sky. His voice was sad. ‘It was true, more or less, what we said at the inquest. He took a handful of pills, I heard him making noises in the bathroom. We sat up with him, making him throw them up. Me and Mum. Tell them that and they’d put him away again, self-harm, they’d say.’

She thought of what Paul had said, the silent villagers, the bodies of the dead hidden in the high valley. Closing around the thing that might give them all away. She heard a sound from the Carters’ garden, a soft rustling, then a burst of laughter and voices as though a flap had opened in the tent, but she didn’t turn to look. Her thoughts ranged wild, but she tried to bring them back in, to sound calm.

‘You could all be covering up. Your mum, taking care of old Mr Bray all this time. When he saw me in the pub with Paul that night did he think the time had come to tell what he knew? Who he saw.’

At the mention of Paul’s name Danny had gone still, his face stiffened into resistance, close to hers. His feet were sockless, in trainers almost disintegrating, splashes of mud up his trousers.

‘All these years,’ she said, only sad now. ‘Bray must have said something about that night. You must have heard something.’

Slowly Danny shook his head. ‘Only Mum would talk to him,’ he said. ‘She’d shut the kitchen door. We’d hear him
mumbling away, for hours. Martin would go upstairs with his hands over his ears.’ He looked down. ‘He wasn’t always nice. He didn’t always make sense.’

The old man trotting out his dislocated thoughts, sometimes bitter, sometimes mad. Sometimes sharp and clear and true. Who would have killed him?

‘If you weren’t protecting your brother then why did you tell the police it was me you saw going out to meet Bray?’ He said nothing but she held her ground. ‘Your mum lied to the police,’ she said. He looked down, stony. ‘She said I arranged to meet him.’

He made a choked sound. ‘She doesn’t lie. It’s what he told her, he got a message.’ Rubbing at his face with a ragged sleeve. ‘I thought it was you. I did think it was you. It was only later, when I saw you again. Then I thought maybe I’d been wrong.’

‘Knew you’d been wrong,’ she said fiercely. ‘What changed your mind?’

‘I didn’t know at first,’ he said. ‘A woman, that’s all I saw, it was late, it was dark. Small, like you. Then that scarf. That’s why I said … because I’d seen you in it that morning, in the same place. Mum said I had to tell them what I saw.’ She watched him.

‘When was it?’ she said, and he looked up, he looked into her face and the lines softened, and quite unexpectedly, something cleared in the air between them.

‘We were out in the boat, Wednesday night,’ he said, and she nodded, she’d seen them launching the dinghy as she and Paul stood on the quay. ‘Me and Mart. It was late, but that funny light, nowhere to hide this time of year, it stays in the sky after the sun’s gone down. Like, like a glow.’ He ducked his head to see if she’d understood then went on. ‘Mart was out of it, lying on the boards. Asleep. I’d been sculling and I sat down to let her drift a bit, I was knackered. It was warm. It’s the only place – out there. On the water. Thinking about
nothing, the light all grey.’ He sighed, soft. ‘Drifting. I looked over the bow and I saw … someone I thought was you. Very late, ten, eleven. Coming out along the sea wall to the house.’

From where they stood now you could only see the other side, the tide so high it was grey-green water all the way, the marsh submerged. Power Station Beach where she’d looked at his brown shoulders, a hundred years ago, and she imagined him weathering under the sun, growing old, turning to stone. The power station was black under clouds. The crooked house was behind them, concealed by the marquee and The Laurels, and inside her the familiar impulse stirred, prodded. Run.

He was close to her, she could hear his breathing, she could smell the alien scents off him, varnish and diesel and mud. Mud under everything. ‘You were in the house when it happened, upstairs all the time, you were listening,’ he said softly. She could see the gleam of his eyes and she felt him step inside her head. Paul never came inside her head, he circled, he left her in peace. ‘When he killed them,’ Danny said, and his voice was quiet. Alison thought of Paul’s silence. What had he wanted Roger to tell the police?

‘I think it’s only you that knows what happened that night. Somewhere inside.’ He put his hand up to her head but didn’t touch her, it hovered, an inch away, in her peripheral vision. If she turned, she’d see the lines in his palm. If she looked, she’d see. ‘It’s in there,’ he said. ‘You know it’s in there.’

Alison didn’t turn her head. ‘So it was late,’ she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘You saw her from the boat. If she wasn’t me, who was she? How are you so sure now?’

‘You don’t walk like her,’ he said, and he set his hands on the solid place where her back flared out at the hip. He stepped back, and removed his hands. Drew in his elbows, made his shoulders narrow, his back bent a little over. ‘She wore the scarf different. Tied under the chin.’

The image moved in her head, like a shape in fog, it shifted.
A figure bent into the wind, in her scarf. ‘How did Stephen get the message?’ she said, half turning, seeking Gina under the trees behind her, turning further, scanning the spindly trunks but there was no sign of her. The marquee gleamed pearly white: she saw a flap open in it, a slight figure in a smudge of flowered silk emerged, back to the white wall, edging along it jerkily as if trying to escape. The woman’s hands fluttered, her calves against the marquee wall were spindly. Narrow-shouldered.

Alison looked back at Danny Watts, who had his arms folded across himself, watching her. He knew she was about to run.

She leaned and pulled off a sandal, shook her foot out of the other. She still had the stupid little bag under her arm and she stared at it.

‘Someone called the pub and asked to talk to him,’ he said. ‘He said to Mum, the Grace girl’s at the house, she’s waiting. Something like that. Just before closing time. Stephen came straight over to tell Mum, then he was off, she said. It’ll be about her dad, he said.’

Somewhere under her ribs the stone formed itself, it dug in. It hurt. ‘He loved my dad,’ she said.

Danny held out his hand and without a word she put the stupid little handbag in it. He gazed. ‘Where you going?’

She’d taken a breath then, ready to tell him, but found herself only smiling, because if he was in her head then he’d know by now, there was only one place left for her to go. She looked back at the marquee but the woman had gone. Lucy Carter had gone. And Alison began to run.

As she came around the back of the compound, the end of the garden where the trees thickened, she heard something in the dense undergrowth as she broke away but she only headed down, to where the estuary spread out grey-green and patterned like a maze.

The slope flattened out below her to sea level and in the
low light the hedge leading away to the dyke looked black. The silky reddish grass on the landward side swayed and whispered and suddenly, blindingly low, a broad shaft of sun flared from below a huge bank of cloud, opening a slit in the grey and illuminating the flooded landscape. The water had risen almost to the foot of the sea wall: it was like the end of the world.

As if all the air in her lungs had been abruptly used up Alison juddered and stopped, half falling against the new fence. She smelled pine and creosote, she felt the roughness of the new wood against her cheek. She looked.

In the low-slanted light she saw something. Someone. A stick girl, all thin legs and arms, capering black along the sea wall as the water rose, leaning down into the wind then throwing her body upright, hair streaming out behind her. She saw herself. Esme.

PC Stuart Jennings looked around the pub tables, sidestepping with a jump when he felt something around his ankles: he leaned down to retrieve a crisp bag. The tide had begun to creep over the quay. Sarah Rutherford saw him eye the grey horizon in dismay as he straightened up. First chance he gets, she thought, he’ll be back in Surrey.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Gone,’ he said. ‘Kid’s gone again.’

Sarah turned to look, she crouched in case the girl had secreted herself under a table but then the back door of the pub banged open and she recognised the landlord, Ron Thwaites, standing on his threshold. He was unshaven and red-eyed, half feral. Shit, these people, Sarah thought, depressed. They drink too much, they stay up too late, they can’t even keep themselves clean.

‘Where’s the girl?’ she said to Thwaites. ‘Gina’s girl.’

But she’d come to ask him something else.

All
I know’s what old Bray told me
, Cathy Watts had said.
He thought she was going to talk to him about her dad. Esme Grace. He’d been waiting for her to come back, he said, he wasn’t going to tell no police.

And then Sarah had found her patience running out, the woman’s flinty face staring at her over folded arms.

‘And of course you told him it was his duty to tell the authorities? If he had evidence. Of course, you’d have told him that.’ They faced each other, both women with the same stance, feet planted, arms across their bodies. Sarah could feel Jennings standing nervously behind her. ‘The longer it goes on, the easier it is just to say nothing? Perjury is one thing, you were never cautioned, neither of you. There are other charges, withholding evidence. Perverting the course of justice.’

‘You talked to him.’ Cathy Watts’s voice was a soft hiss as she stood her ground. Sarah couldn’t help but see the sag of her cottage’s roofline behind her, the grime at her windows. ‘Your job, to get the truth out of people? Pity you a’nt no good at it.’

‘Or did you just think, let them get on with it? Outsiders, the lot of them?’ Cathy Watts hadn’t bothered to answer that.

‘And what about her?’ Rutherford went on, softly. From behind her Jennings moved from the gravel to the grass, and he was beside her. ‘Did you ever think of the girl that survived? When you sent your boy to us to say he’d seen her.’

‘Her mother’s daughter,’ said Cathy Watts, but something slid and shifted behind the watchful eyes and involuntarily Sarah Rutherford took a step forward and abruptly she was in the old woman’s space. Watts didn’t flinch.

‘That’s enough,’ said Sarah. ‘
Enough
. That girl. Esme Grace. That girl. You know what she was like when we found her? She’d held her sisters in her arms. She saw her brother with half his head off. You think she loved them any less than your boys loved their brother? She thinks – Esme thinks – Alison …’
Cathy Watts was staring at her now, really staring. ‘She
knows
her father never did it. We’ve let her down.’ She moved her head, from Jennings to the horizon to Cathy Watts. ‘I have. You have. Something bad came into that house. Something terrible. We thought it was gone, but it isn’t.’